Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  —And don’t think you can climb a mountain and enjoy the pristine beauty of nature, either. Climb the highest mountain and you’ll find an orange peel and three empty beer cans.

  —Breakfast in a good hotel used to be one of the great luxuries. Forget breakfast. The chef doesn’t come in until 11 A.M. and then he starts to prepare lunch.

  Most breakfast menus advertise “fresh orange juice,” but it almost never is fresh, especially in Florida.

  Ellen stayed in the Hilton in Boston last week. The menu said “fresh-squeezed orange juice.” Ellen has knowing taste buds. She challenged the waiter, then the head waiter. (Like father, like daughter.) The head waiter insisted it was fresh orange juice.

  “If you don’t believe me,” he said, “I’ll show you the bottle.” Fresh orange juice, as John McPhee once wrote, “is juice that’s still in the orange when you order it.”

  —Tomatoes are a joke except for about three weeks a year. Tomatoes used to be dark red, juicy and full of flavor. Now they’re used like food coloring or parsley. They’re merely decoration. They’re pink, hard, dry and tasteless.

  —House paint is not as good as it once was. It peels. One reason is that manufacturers are no longer allowed to use lead in their paint because small children, who ate loose paint in deteriorating houses, became ill.

  It’s probably a necessary law that prohibits the use of lead, but it sure makes poor paint and it’s too bad we couldn’t stop kids from eating paint instead.

  —Postal service is a joke compared to what it was twenty-five or thirty years ago when everyone got two deliveries a day. Can you imagine that? Two deliveries a day? You’re lucky to get one some days.

  I hope it’s just things, not people, that are deteriorating.

  A Room at the Inn

  Hotels are on my mind because I slept in one for a week recently in Atlanta.

  Atlanta is a good hotel city. Architect John Portman started the trend toward those huge atrium lobbies. He thinks a hotel should be an experience, not just a place to sleep. Portman has changed the look of big, expensive downtown hotels in America and made them more interesting. They’re no longer big boxes with a lot of little boxes inside.

  I stayed in one of Portman’s hotels, the Westin. It was a very nice hotel and although I’m impressed with his work, I’m not as interested in an experience as I am in a night’s sleep. In his successful effort to be interesting, Mr. Portman sacrifices some convenience for the guests. Many hotels have little scorecards they leave for guests to fill out. They ask a guest to rank the hotel’s various services. I never fill them out, but here are several comments I have that would apply to most hotels in America:

  —I wish the bellman carrying my bags to the room would stop asking those same questions: “Did you have a nice flight?” “Have you stayed with us before?” and “How long are you going to be with us?”

  —There is too much knocking at your door in most hotels. I’m not doing anything sneaky, but I don’t like hotel employees knocking at the door to check on something all the time.

  —They can turn down the bed if they want to while I’m out for dinner, but please stop leaving me those two little chocolates on the pillow.

  —Hotels have got to wake up to the fact that seven o’clock is too late to begin serving breakfast. Because they start so late, it is often difficult to get into the dining room for breakfast by eight o’clock and room service is all jammed up between seven and eight. It isn’t unusual to wait forty-five minutes for toast and coffee to be brought to your room … for $11.95, “SERVICE NOT INCLUDED.”

  —Hotels ought to get together on a shower-control mechanism. Most of them work OK if you know how they work but if you’ve never seen the type before, they can be difficult. You can either freeze or scald yourself. One problem they don’t consider is that about half of all Americans need glasses and you can’t wear your glasses in the shower, so you can’t read the directions on the shower control.

  —The new thing is for American hotels to pretend they have a concierge. The concierge is one of the best things about staying at a hotel in Europe. This man is available in the lobby at all times of day and night. He knows everything and can do anything. If you want reservations at a good restaurant or tickets to the opera, he knows how to get them.

  American hotels don’t have the vaguest idea what a concierge is and they should be prohibited from giving the word a bad name by using it.

  —The price for a good hotel room has gone out of sight. Prices have risen higher and faster than any other single item I can think of. The rooms at the Westin are $130 for one person and $190 for two. Wow!

  —Hotels ought to stop putting so much of their own advertising literature around the room. I’m renting the room and they ought to leave the space on top of the dresser and the television cabinet for me, not for their own commercials. And if you put all their literature in a drawer, the maid takes it out and puts it back where they want it the next day.

  —The lights near or over the bed are almost always impossible to read by and very often the on/off switch is hard to find or inaccessible from a prone position.

  —Hangers are too often cleverly designed so they’re hard for a guest to take home, but they’re hard to use, too.

  Please come back and see us again real soon.

  PROBLEMS

  Withering Away with the Weather

  Sometimes I get the feeling the Earth doesn’t really want us. It sure makes it difficult to live here.

  Last night when I got home just before dinner, I stopped and looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen door. The sun hits it in late afternoon so it isn’t really an accurate indicator, but it read 94 degrees. On the radio they were calling it an official 90.

  I went upstairs to change into my old sitting-around clothes, but I didn’t stay up there long because it must have been 100 in the bedroom. We have an air conditioner but it hadn’t been turned on because no one was going to be in the room. I hate to spend money cooling an empty room.

  This morning I left the house at 6:10 and the same thermometer that had read 94 degrees last evening was at an even 40 degrees. Do you think some force is using weather to drive us crazy or make us move somewhere else, off Earth?

  Driving to work, I got to thinking about how near the Earth is to being uninhabitable. I’ve never read what temperatures the human body can take for high and low extremes but it seems likely that parts of this planet are close to being outside the range of human tolerance at times. The temperature gets into the high 120’s in Death Valley, California, and it has been as high as 134 degrees. That’s in the shade and there isn’t any shade out there. The Earth’s temperature has peaked at 136 in Libya. Muammar al-Qaddafi aside, this is reason enough for me not to book a two-week vacation there.

  In Vostok, Antarctica, temperatures have been recorded as low as 126 degrees below zero. Can the same body that would stay alive in 136-degree heat also keep going 262 degrees below that? I remember reading about a place in Montana where the temperature fell from 44 degrees above zero around noon to 56 degrees below zero late that night. That’s putting heating systems and the human body to the test.

  Somehow we seem to live through extreme temperature changes. Air-conditioning and central heating make it easier, but the human race survived before it had either. I don’t see how.

  Nature is always making things tough for us. If it isn’t temperature, it’s another kind of terrible weather or natural phenomenon that makes life difficult. Sunday there was a picture in my newspaper of a row of expensive beach houses that are in imminent danger of being washed away because the ocean has eroded the sand out from under them, leaving the houses precariously perched on top of their telephone pole–like stilt pilings.

  At another time of year, that same page of the same paper might have a picture of snow drifts burying a row of cars on a highway near Buffalo or of a house being washed downstream by the overflowing Mississippi in the delta. Just when yo
u think you’re lucky to be in the one safe part of the country, something strikes you. I look with some sense of sad superiority at the stories of raging fires coming down the canyons in California or of twisters sweeping the Kansas plains.

  While I was worrying about all the bad luck the rest of the country was having last fall, a hurricane struck the East Coast while we were in Maine. We drove home to Connecticut the following day, following detours where the road had been blocked off by fallen telephone poles, and found the lawn in front of our house with enough major branches down so that I had to call a tree surgeon to clear them away.

  I am always worried that the Earth will become too warm, too cold, too wet or too dry for humans. We are, after all, fragile creatures. It wouldn’t take much of a change to make life on Earth impossible.

  Fortunately for me, I have something more important to worry about today. I think my checking account is overdrawn.

  More Is Not Merrier

  I don’t mean to be selfish. I don’t want to keep the world to myself and a few friends, but there does come a point when a crowd ruins everything. We have all the people this country needs now. I associate overpopulation with poverty and unhappiness, not with joy and plenty.

  If the Bible were rewritten this year with some quotations from God, I think he’d probably want to change that line in Genesis where he’s quoted as saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …”

  For all we know, God may have been misquoted in the first place. You know how inaccurate reporters are. A second Bible I have quotes God as saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth.”

  The present occupants of the planet earth have more than fulfilled that biblical command. We’ve filled the earth and ought to stop multiplying before it overflows and we spill out into space.

  We ought to have a grand plan for the planet’s future that would include arrangements for maintaining some relationship between the number of people trying to live on earth and earth’s ability to sustain that many.

  We’ve already ruined all the rivers from the Yangtze to the Mississippi. Do you know of a lake you can drink from? Lake water was all drinkable before we started dumping our garbage, our sewage and our commercial waste in it. Now we’ve started ruining our oceans and, big as they are, they’ll be seas of slop before long.

  We often find ourselves breathing air we’d prefer not to have in our lungs, but we have no choice. That’s all the air there is. Breathing Los Angeles air must be the equivalent of three packs a day.

  The increase in the number of people is greatest in the countries least able to take care of them. On television, you see emaciated women in Ethiopia with emaciated babies, both dying of starvation. Nine months later you see dying women with week-old babies. The women must have been dying when they conceived the children.

  Does it never occur to these people that it would have been better for her, better for the child and better for the world if she had said no to the guy? If the pope had been there and she could have asked his advice, what would he have said? Would he have advised her to go ahead and be fruitful and replenish the earth?

  He’s a good pope. He probably would have said, “In your case, I’m going to make an exception. The earth doesn’t need any more people in Ethiopia this year, thank you.”

  It’s a pain to those who feel strongly about the tragedy of the black condition in America to see so many blacks assuring themselves and their children a dismal ghetto future by reproducing beyond their ability to take care of their children.

  If birth control of one kind is wrong, you’d think birth control of any kind would be wrong. The most effective method of birth control is the widely—but reluctantly practiced—inhibition of desire. It’s why all women are not constantly being attacked. Men curb their desire or rape would be rampant. It’s birth control at the beginning. Do opponents of birth control oppose it?

  It’s difficult to understand how any society, government, philosophy or religion could encourage its constituents to do any more than reproduce its own numbers.

  We could do great things in the world if we could stabilize the population and then gradually reduce it.

  I’d like to see the world return to the way it was in the 1930s, when I was growing up.

  Maybe they’d tear down some of the buildings they’ve put up on the vacant lots we used to play in.

  They could tear up some of the wide concrete strips that cross the country and give us back some of those lovely little dirt roads that wound their way among the farms.

  The line at the motor vehicle bureau might get shorter.

  In summer, there might be a place at the shore big enough to spread a blanket again for a picnic.

  The people who like to fish might find a quiet pond far from the noise of a radio.

  There’d be seats on the bus, no traffic jams with the shopping carts at the supermarket.

  Who knows, we might get a little of our privacy back if the world stopped having more babies than it can happily hold.

  Doctors, Doctors Everywhere

  There are too many doctors, according to a report issued by the American Medical Association.

  For me to believe that, the report would have had to be issued by patients instead of doctors. I’d like to get together a panel of patients who had just spent the morning sitting in a waiting room before being admitted for an eight-minute session with the doctor.

  It also would be interesting to find out what someone thinks who became desperately ill in say, Kumquat, Iowa, and almost died before he got to the nearest doctor sixty miles away in Fort Dodge.

  There are hundreds of communities in the United States that have no doctor. In some of them, a doctor would have a hard time making the doctors’ average $108,000 a year, but if a doctor in a small town could make, say $60,000, or about three times as much as the high school principal makes, would that be a bad deal?

  The idea that there are too many doctors comes up every year. It’s as wrong this year as it was last year. There are not too many doctors. There are not enough doctors, and until each of us is assured immortality, there will never be enough doctors. Let me know when all pain and suffering is over. Call me when cancer is a thing of the past and when AIDS is a memory like diphtheria, and then I’ll agree there are enough doctors.

  Most of us hold the medical profession in high esteem. I do. We seem to have a higher regard for doctors than doctors have for themselves. I hope they aren’t right.

  Dr. James Sammons, the executive vice president of the AMA, says there’s an overproduction of physicians, and he wants to cut down on the number of people admitted to medical schools and on the number of foreign doctors admitted to practice in the United States.

  Dr. Sammons denies it but he’s talking about doctors’ income, not patients’ health, when he says there are too many doctors. The AMA spends too much time on everything but medicine.

  The report says too many doctors could mean that a doctor’s skill might deteriorate because the physician “may not perform certain procedures frequently enough to maintain a high level of skill.” You mean, they need the practice?

  The report also says that, because there are too many specialists, some doctors might be driven into general practice. I don’t know enough to argue that point but, if true, is it terrible? If enough doctors are driven out of plastic surgery, Kumquat, Iowa, may get a doctor of its own someday. Maybe doctors will even start making house calls again.

  The AMA sounds like a bricklayers’ union. The bricklayers want to limit membership in the union so there will always be more bricks that need to be laid than there are bricklayers to lay them. Doctors don’t want a lot of young doctors offering their services for less so they can pay back the money they borrowed to get through medical school.

  Everyone in any business wishes there weren’t so many people in it. Established lawyers complain that law schools are turning out young lawyers faster than the legal profession can absorb them
. Newspaper reporters wish there weren’t so many bright young people coming out of college who want to be reporters.

  In many hospitals across the country, doctors trained in medical schools in India, the Philippines and Mexico are doing the dirty work. They’re working the long night shifts, doing the instant surgery on no-pay patients in the emergency rooms and generally providing medical services that would otherwise be neglected.

  If foreign doctors are trained in approved teaching hospitals, the only thing wrong with their working here is that they are cheating the country they left. Dr. Sammons objects to their presence for the same reason Lee Iacocca would like to keep Japanese cars out of the United States.

  Paper, Paper Everywhere

  I wallow in paper.

  When the mail comes, it’s a plethora of paper, most of which I don’t need or want.

  At the office, I get originals and duplicates of everything and then Jane makes copies of the copies. Jane and I work together, and she is better organized than I am but she’s obsessed with making copies. One year when I got my eight tickets for the Giants’ home football games, she Xeroxed my tickets so she’d have a record of them. (I still use the word “Xerox” even though I know it’s a patented trade name. The proper word for what I mean is “photocopy” but it’s not nearly so good a word as “Xerox.” Sorry about that, Xerox. I also call all paper handkerchiefs “Kleenex,” all plastic cups “Styrofoam,” and sometimes I even call the record player the “Victrola.”)

  America has gone mad with paper since the invention of photocopy machines, and now the computer printers are spewing forth more printouts of everything than anyone possibly could have a use for.

  Once upon a time, every office had a secretary who spent most of the day typing things that didn’t need to be typed. Now it no longer takes a secretary to make a duplicate of anything. A walk to the copying machine is as much a part of office routine for the average executive as a walk to the water cooler used to be. The executive often makes copies of things that don’t need to be copied while the secretary is at the water cooler.